Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellows
Center for Latin American, Caribbean & Latinx Studies
Global Humanities Cluster
2024-2027 Postdoctoral Fellow
Jason Ahlenius’s research examines the politics of labor and race in nineteenth-century Mexico’s borderland regions through literature, visual studies, contract, and other media. The project seeks to understand how Mexico, one of the first and most radical abolitionist nations in the Americas, justified and obscured practices of forced labor in agricultural capitalism in Tejas, Yucatán, and Chiapas. He has received fellowships from the Social Sciences Research Council, Fulbright-Hays Program, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and NYU’s Graduate Research Initiative to carry out archival research in Mexico, the US, Guatemala, Cuba, and Spain. He holds a PhD from New York University.
Department of History
Urban Humanities Cluster
2024-2027 Postdoctoral Fellow
Nathalie Barton is a historian of the United States in the twentieth century, with a focus on cities, racial inequality, and housing. Her research investigates how changing ideas of race and ownership have shaped experiences of home, real estate, and the urban built environment. Her current project centers on the landlord-tenant relationship in the second half of the twentieth century and explores how the shifting social, legal, and financial dynamics of the rental relationship further entrenched urban inequality along racial lines. She received her PhD and MA in History from the University of Chicago.
Department of History of Art & Architecture
Urban Humanities Cluster
2023-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow
Peter Sebastian Chesney is a sensory historian of technology in the cities of the 20th-century United States. Using sensory studies, urbanism, and the history of technology, Chesney maps routes through the city that did not rely on sight. The ear, nose, tongue, and skin, lay foundations for alternative narratives to the dominant paradigm of L.A. as the self-declared “white spot” of cis-male, hetero, and able-bodied Anglo America. These stories animate Chesney’s book in progress, Drive Time: A Sensory History of the Car Cultures in 20th-Century L.A. He holds a PhD in History from UCLA.
Department of History of Art & Architecture
Urban Humanities Cluster
2022-2025 Postdoctoral Fellow
Lee Ann Custer is a historian of the art, architecture, and urbanism of the United States. Her concerns as a scholar and a teacher focus on the ways in which images mediate ideas of place and space in order to ask whose experiences they fortify and whose they omit. Her current book project considers the socio-spatial politics of urban air and its visualization by modern artists living in New York City from 1880 to 1940. A second ongoing project studies the pedagogy and photography of architect and city planner Denise Scott Brown in the mid-twentieth century. Lee Ann holds a PhD in History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania.
Center for Latin American, Caribbean & Latinx Studies
Global Humanities Cluster
2022-2025 Postdoctoral Fellow
Lidiana de Moraes specializes in postcolonial and decolonial feminist discourses, focusing on the intersecting narratives of contemporary African and Afro-Brazilian women artists. Her book project, The Afropoe(li)tics of Insubordination: Feminist Luso-Afro-Brazilian Cultural Production in a Global Context, interrogates social justice issues through literature, film, music, and visual arts from a transnational and transatlantic perspective. Her research emphasizes how Black women shape the Black Atlantic’s perspectives while collectively manifesting as activists. Lidiana holds a PhD in Literary, Cultural, and Linguistic Studies from the University of Miami.
Department of Asian Studies
Environmental Humanities Cluster
2022-2025 Postdoctoral Fellow
Eric Gurevitch is a historian of science, technology, and medicine focusing on precolonial South Asia. His book project, Everyday Sciences: Making Knowledge Local in South Asia, explores the emergence of practical sciences – everything from toxicology to weather prediction to mercantile mathematics – in vernacular languages in South Asia and the debates that arose around them in the medieval and early modern periods. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago conferred jointly by the Department of South Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on the Conceptual & Historical Studies of Science.
Department of Jewish Studies
Urban Humanities Cluster
2024-2027 Postdoctoral Fellow
Re’ee Hagay studies the intersection of urban development and the production of national territoriality in Israel/Palestine. He focuses on the experience of Mizrahi Jews, the ethno-class of Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa who have been segregated as human frontiers at the margins of the evolving national territory. Combining ethnography, textual analysis, and research in media archives, his book project, Silent Signs: A Poetics of Multilayered Urbanism, investigates how Mizrahi poetics’ engagement with traces of earlier urban layers challenges abstract notions of national and urban progress. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Cornell University.
Department of English
Environmental Humanities Cluster
2023-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow
Anna Hill’s research focuses on representations of environmental crisis in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, with a particular emphasis on literature of the United States and questions about memory, affect, and the ecological afterlives of empire. Her book project explores how late-twentieth-century authors reworked major genres of the American novel in light of emergent discourses about environmental crisis and global climate change. This project makes the case that the realist novel — and literature more broadly — continues to offer a generative resource for environmental imagining and environmental justice in the Anthropocene. Anna holds a PhD in English from Yale University.
Program in Culture, Advocacy & Leadership
Urban Humanities Cluster
2023-2026 Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
Jonathan Karp researches histories of race and performance in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. His book project, Performances of Aftermath: Race, Labor, and Crisis in the Progressive Era, investigates how racial regimes were challenged and reestablished during and in the wake of the East St. Louis massacre of 1917. The work demonstrates that a wide range of figures, including Ida B. Wells, Josephine Baker, U.S. congressmen, and militiamen in the Illinois National Guard, improvised performances that represented the riots and intervened in them. He holds a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University.
Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies
Global Humanities Cluster
2023-2026 Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
Lara Lookabaugh is an interdisciplinary feminist geographer whose research engages decolonial and Indigenous geographies, feminist political geography, critical development studies, and geographies of memory in Latin America and the southern United States. Through a six-year participatory research collaboration with a Mam Maya women’s collective in Guatemala, her current project explores how the everyday political and artistic practices of Indigenous women create space to envision and enact alternative futures. Lara is a founding member of two editorial and writing collectives, Desirable Futures and Against Colonial Grounds, which bring together scholars to explore colonial constructions of time and futurity and the intersections of Black and Indigenous Geographies. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Department of English
Global Humanities Cluster
2023-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow
Helen Makhdoumian is a literary studies scholar who takes up a relational approach to theorize the legacies of collective violence in the Middle East and in North America. In so doing, she expands upon discourses in trauma, memory, and genocide studies, as well as diaspora, transnational, and migration studies. Her book project, Nested Memory and the After-Words of Removal, focuses on multigenerational transmissions of memory in the face of the recursivity of collective trauma. It features contemporary texts by Armenian American, Palestinian American, American Indian, and First Nations authors. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Department of Anthropology
Urban Humanities Cluster
2022-2025 Postdoctoral Fellow
Ana Luiza Morais Soares is a historical anthropologist whose research focuses on the history of Indigenous child separation and labor exploitation in the Brazilian Amazon, practices which played a significant role in ethnic identity erasure. She connects this history with how today’s Brazilian Indigenous communities are harnessing social media to counteract and reverse this erasure, reclaiming their identities in our digital age. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Center for Latin American, Caribbean & Latinx Studies
Environmental Humanities Cluster
2022-2025 Postdoctoral Fellow
Matthew Plishka works at the intersection of social and environmental history to examine how marginalized communities navigate ecological crises. His book project Battling Banana Blight: A Multispecies History of Jamaica’s Long Green Revolution, 1870-1960 explores how Afro-Jamaican smallholders navigated a series of economic and ecological crises, particularly the banana-crop killing fungus known as Panama Disease. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Pittsburgh.
Program in Communication of Science & Technology
Environmental Humanities Cluster
2024-2027 Postdoctoral Fellow
Clara Wilch researches how environment and performance interrelate with a focus on philosophical and creative approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Her current book project illuminates the climatic influences of “icescapes,” performances that stage encounters between humans and ice, and centers modern and contemporary icescapes set in the Inuit co-governed territory of Nunavut, Canada. This project illuminates the creation of material/social infrastructures while attending to the intertwined histories of environmental change, colonialism, economics, and gender. She strives to interweave methods and insights from the humanities, arts, and sciences to help reconceive and advance environmental and multi-species justice. She holds a PhD in Theatre & Performance Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Alumni
Elvira Aballí Morell, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies
James Pilgrim, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, School of Art & Design
Jesús Ruiz, Vanderbilt University, Center for Latin American, Caribbean & Latinx Studies
Anna Tybinko, Colby College, Department of Spanish